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Welcome to the University of Tennessee Etnier
Ichthyological Collection

The
University of Tennessee Etnier Ichthyological Collection (UTEIC)
is a state-supported facility used for undergraduate, graduate,
and professional teaching, research, and public service. UTEIC
houses over 450,000 specimens of fishes. The collection is
the primary repository of the native fishes of Tennessee. It
houses the most important collection in the world of fishes
from the southern Appalachians, and has a strong emphasis on
collections from the eastern U. S., Mexico, and Central America.
It is a basic resource for studies in taxonomic/systematic
ichthyology, functional morphology, as well as ecology, and
will soon showcase a database containing vast information on
fishes of the Southeast and around the world.
In addition, the general public and numerous state and federal agencies, conservation
groups, environmental consultants, and legal council rely on
our specimens for general information and for data critical
to biodiversity, habitat management, and conservation decisions.

With
over 37,000 lots, it is the largest fish collection
in the state of Tennessee and the third largest overall in
the southeastern U.S. No other fish collection in the world
can match its breadth of holdings from the rivers draining the western
slope of the Appalachians that contain the most diverse freshwater
fauna of any temperate region. The UTEIC
had its origin in the 1960s, when Dr. David A. Etnier began collecting
fish for teaching and research on the fauna of Tennessee and surrounding
states. Through specimen contributions from governmental agencies,
biological consultants, and scientific studies, UTEIC has continued
to grow by an average of 1200 specimens per year since 2000.

For almost 40 years, the UTEIC has served as both a repository and
reference for private and governmental agencies working on the fishes
of southeastern United States. The UTEIC contains substantial holdings
of inventories made during in-stream monitoring surveys by both the
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources
Agency (TWRA). Identifications of the approximately 300 species of
fishes endemic to the Tennessee and Cumberland River basins (Etnier
and Starnes 2001) collected during these surveys would be incredibly
difficult without the availability of UTEIC as a reference. Additionally,
we are entering a new period in systematics in which collections will
be increasingly valuable as a source of vouchered material for conservation
genetics and molecular phylogenetics. The UTEIC contains priceless
information for understanding the historical ecological niches of fishes
and for documenting distributional data and changes due to human alteration
of river drainages and global climate change. We anticipate that the
use of UTEIC will increase greatly with an on-line presence and the
expansion of molecular methodologies for examining the biodiversity
holdings in UTEIC.